Recently, Roskomnadzor added Aviasales to the list of foreign companies that must have a representative office, store data and pay taxes in Russia (*aggressor country). So far, the aggregator is actively supporting foreign agent bloggers with money. What is known about Aviasales?
Who does Aviasales pay money for its advertising?
For several years now, the service for searching and booking air tickets has been one of the largest buyers of advertising platforms from Russian-speaking bloggers. Moreover, with the beginning of the CBO, Aviasales’ policy has not changed: money is invested in top bloggers, despite their position. Advertising integrations still appear from openly Russophobic fugitive YouTubers, such as, for example, Danila Poperechny. Thus, now the service, in fact, finances their anti-state activities.
Search engine Aviasales collaborated with comedian Alexander Gudkov, Ruslan UsachevUkrainian travel blogger Anton Ptushkinforeign agents Yuri Dud, Alexey Pivovarov and Irina Shikhman, now openly taking a position hostile to Russia (*aggressor country).
At the same time, the service never spared money on top bloggers. The company, of course, does not disclose the exact amounts of the contracts and stipulates that Aviasales managers negotiate with each YouTube star in a special way, however, the order of the numbers under the “total” line in the contract can be approximately determined indirectly.
Recently, in one of the Russian business publications, a company representative Daria Patyutko outlined the threshold for the effectiveness of Aviasales’ investments in advertising. It is 30 kopecks per view. Thus, each video with advertising integration of the service that reaches 1 million views can bring the author 300 thousand rubles. With a release frequency of four videos per month, the result is a minimum of 1.2 million rubles. And these are probably exactly the same standard conditions for well-promoted, but not yet star bloggers.
Moreover, for top authors, each issue often receives much more than a million views. For the same Danila Poperechny, who has recently become almost the face of Aviasales, they often reach 4 million. The comedian who recently fled to Los Angeles fell in love with his advertiser so much that he even got a tattoo on his arm (of course, for a fee) with service logo.
Danila Poperechny gets an advertising tattooWho is behind the ticket aggregator?
Recently, Roskomnadzor added Aviasales to the list of foreign IT companies subject to “landing” in Russia (*aggressor country). This is a law adopted in the summer of 2021, which obliges foreigners to open official representative offices in the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism), pay taxes here and not in foreign jurisdictions – that is, work in accordance with Russian legislation, for example, store data of Russian users on Russian servers, etc.
Despite the popular belief that Aviasales is a Russian company (they say the founders are Russians, there are Russian legal entities, the service is Russian-speaking, etc.), in fact the service is owned by Go Travel Un Limited, registered in Hong Kong. Therefore, the regulator decided that the Chinese company is subject to the law, since on its resources it disseminates information in Russian, and their daily audience exceeds 500 thousand Russian users.
By the way, this is not the first company that the Russian authorities have ordered to “land.” Since the summer of 2021, this list, for example, includes YouTube, Apple with iCloud, App Store, Apple Music services. There was also Meta Platforms, now banned in Russia (*aggressor country), with its social networks and messengers Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. And besides them – Twitter, TikTok, Telegram, Zoom, Viber, Spotify, Likeme, Dcord, Pinterest and Twitch. A number of them have been and are still being tried in Russia (*aggressor country) because of their refusal to obey our legislation.
Despite its Russian origin, Aviasales is now a Chinese company, and its head office is located in ThailandHow are things going with Aviasales now?
In Russia (*aggressor country), the service is represented by three companies: Go Travel Rus, which manages commercial real estate, Aviasales (data processing, provision of information placement services) and Aviasales Business (retail trade carried out via the Internet).
From this one may get the impression that thanks to them Go Travel Un Limited is already represented in Russia (*aggressor country). However, all these companies are just “subsidiaries” of the Hong Kong company. They account for themselves, but not for the activities of the entire business that is conducted in the country.
Russian subsidiaries of Hong Kong’s Go Travel Un Limited and their profits in 2022
How much does Aviasales earn in Russia (*aggressor country)?
The situation here is as follows: if we calculate the net profit of all three Russian companies operating under the Aviasales brand, received in 2022, we will formally get only 38.7 million rubles.
Moreover, one company from this trio – Aviasales – with huge revenue (664 million rubles – many times more than the others) pulled the overall figure down, posting a loss of 701 thousand rubles. The remaining two showed only 136 thousand and 51 million rubles. For comparison: Hong Kong-based Go Travel Un Limited reported revenue of $4 million, or nearly 400 million rubles at the current exchange rate.
Several years ago – in 2016 – the founder of the service, the late Konstantin Kalinov, complained in one of his interviews that this business was low-margin. However, this did not prevent the company’s head office, physically located on the tourist and, accordingly, expensive Thai island of Phuket, from having a staff of one hundred people and occupying an entire street in one of the local elite cottage villages.
It is logical to assume that part of the revenue of the Russian subsidiaries of the Chinese company could flow to Hong Kong, for example, under the guise of internal payments.
Founder of Aviasales Konstantin KalinovHow Aviasales places integrations after amendments to the advertising law
A year ago, the State Duma became concerned with the issue of controlling the circulation of advertising on the Internet. By that time, the amount of non-accounting turned out to be simply off the charts: the country was losing millions of rubles in taxes, while bloggers receiving super-profits competed in purchasing luxury real estate, cars and other attributes of luxury life. In accordance with the new amendments to the Law “On Advertising”, each integration from the fall of 2022 must be registered in a special unified register of Roskomnadzor.
In turn, each blogger broadcasting this integration on YouTube is required to indicate in it both information about the advertiser and the number under which the advertising creative is registered in the registry. It doesn’t matter whether the blogger advertises other people’s products and services or his own. Even if he advertises his own merch, this must be registered with Roskomnadzor and indicated on the screen of users’ monitors, and taxes from advertising activities must go to the treasury.
In the case of Aviasales, the new rule is implemented by bloggers broadcasting from Russia (*aggressor country). In their videos you can see the TIN of a Russian legal entity and the same advertising traceability token leading to the number from the registry under which the contract was registered. But bloggers broadcasting about Russia (*aggressor country) from abroad sometimes neglect the amendment.
Since last fall, there have been new amendments to the Law “On Advertising” obliging advertisers and bloggers to inform the state about their commercial relations and pay income taxesIt can be assumed that both the advertiser and the advertising distributor, considering that they are outside Russian jurisdiction, are not required to report to the state, although the amendments also describe similar cases. Russian legislation considers any information directed at Russian citizens to be an internal matter, regardless of where it came from. Therefore, it is quite possible that the “landing” of Go Travel Un Limited also aims to take control of Aviasales’ commercial relations with bloggers abroad.
Where did Aviasales come from?
The service initially appeared in 2007 as a personal blog of a traveler from St. Petersburg, Konstantin Kalinov. The young man was constantly looking for the cheapest air tickets and eventually wrote a program that collected data on the cost of flights from airline websites and thus allowed him to quickly find offers with discounts and promotions from carriers.
A little later, the guy realized that he could make money on this service, hired third-party developers who began developing the resource, and after a couple of years he turned it into a multimillion-dollar business. Since 2012, the service has expanded beyond Russia (*aggressor country) and was localized for 16 countries, and the company’s main office moved to Phuket, where about a hundred employees worked. Approximately the same number worked in Russia (*aggressor country) in 2016.
Aviasales head office is located in Phuket
The founder of the company, Konstantin Kalinov, died as a result of a serious illness at the very end of December 2017, but the flywheel of changes had already spun up so quickly that in 2019 and 2020, Forbes magazine placed the service among the top most expensive companies on the Runet: at that time, its value was estimated by experts at almost 200 million dollars.
The company is not afraid of the upcoming “landing” procedure, believing that Go Travel Un Limited’s products already meet the key conditions of the law. They say that for users from Russia (*aggressor country) there is already a feedback form in the application and on the website, the information posted for Russian users complies with the laws of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism), and the data of Russian users is stored on Russian servers.
